State News

 By CHRIS GREEN

Harris News Service

As the Kansas Energy Office hosts its seventh annual Renewable Energy Conference, members of The Wind Coalition are developing wind projects that will bring the state’s total of clean, renewable energy to 1,000MW by the year’s end.

By Chris Green

Harris News Service

<!--P1-->TOPEKA -- A company building a wind farm in Cloud County agreed Wednesday to help fund a conservation project to protect grassland birds whose habitat could be affected the installation of wind turbines.<!--P2-->

Horizon Wind Energy, the nation's third-largest provider of wind power, announced a voluntary deal with the Ranchland Trust of Kansas and The Nature Conservancy of Kansas.

TOPEKA | Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has taken the pledge — the energy pledge that is.

The governor announced Monday that she has signed T. Boone Pickens' energy independence pledge and supports the Texas oil billionaire's call on the next president and Congress to deliver a comprehensive energy plan in the first 100 days of the next administration.

Sebelius introduced Pickens at a July town meeting in Topeka, where he started his national tour touting his plan to cut the country's dependence on foreign oil.

Coal plants may be back on table for legislature

The leader of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce expects the Legislature to debate again whether to approve proposed coal plants at Holcomb.

Global warming isn’t all bad news. Government policy might not be changing, but public awareness of the problem is on the rise.

That was the message James Hansen, NASA administrator and researcher, delivered Monday afternoon to a packed house at the Spahr Engineering Classroom.

Hansen’s lecture, “Threat to the Planet: Dark and Bright Sides of Global Warming,” focused on the continuous changes that affected the climate of the planet. He said the burning of fossil fuels played a large part in the deteriorating condition of Earth’s atmosphere.

9/22/2008

By DUANE SCHRAG

Salina Journal

With higher energy costs driving up the price of everything -- driving your car as well as eating -- and warnings that Earth's increasingly hostile climate is only going to reduce man's capacity to produce food, what some yearn for is the promise that this is all just a temporary setback.

That your cruise-controlled, climate-controlled, shrink-wrapped, fossil-fueled lifestyle isn't going away.

Alarming projections about the impact of global warming used to be regarded with the same sort of indifference as that paid to doomsday prophets who proselytize from street corners.

It just seemed a little out there.

Governor Kathleen Sebelius and Lt. Governor Mark Parkinson, in a recent letter to the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Regional State Committee Chair David King, applauded the Committee for their unanimous decision to treat wind energy on a more comparable basis with conventional generation sources and encouraged further action by year's end to develop a cost allocation methodology for the regional transmission system.

TOPEKA - A state energy panel wants public input on more than just a proposal to drop the state's speed limit from 70 to 65 mph on major highways.

That idea, touted as a way of helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Kansas, has already generated headlines and some public backlash.

But it's also just one of the 15 recommendations being explored this fall by the Kansas Energy Council, a 35-member study group hoping to help lawmakers set a course for the state's energy policy.